Archive for June, 2010

Jun 28

From Routines to Movements – and Back

By SnO - Post on 2010 June 28 - No Comments - conference

Closing a series of seminars dedicated to Collective Action, Strategy, and Practice[1], the first annual Society and Organizations workshop was held June 25, 2010. HEC Paris had the great honor to welcome some of the world leading scholars in Organization Theory and Sociology and contribute to the advance of research in Social Movements, New Institutional Theory, and Routine Dynamics.

The workshop received the support of the Society and Organizations research center (SnO), funded by the HEC Foundation. Building on a wide range of competences and disciplines, the SnO research center was created in 2009 to investigate both the society-related issues that organizations face and the organizational issues that society experiences.

The conference was made up of 5 sessions. Each guest speaker presented a paper (40/45 min) and was challenged by a prominent international scholar playing the role of provocateur, discussing and engaging the conversation with the audience (15/20 min).

Relating Routine Dynamics to Dynamic Capabilities: Learning About Routines Meets Learning Through Routines

Martha s. Feldman (U. of California, Irvine) - Provocateur: David Seidl (Zurich U.)

Opening the conference, Martha Feldman invited the participants to think about the importance of routines – the basic building blocks of organizing – in social movements. Social movement organizations engage routines to mobilize, recruit, protest, and make decisions. They need to change routines, when their membership or the environment evolves (e.g., when they succeed), and develop various routines to compete and cooperate with others. In the routine dynamics view, routines are considered as “generative systems”: parts of routines interact in a dynamic way, producing both stability (“same” routine) and change (“different” routine). Complementing the dynamic capabilities view, that mostly focuses on exogenous change, the routine dynamics perspective opens the “black box” of routines, emphasizing not only how one can learn about routines but also learn through routines. It also encourages looking at a broad range of routines rather than routines narrowly focused on production.

Setting the provocateur routine for the day, David Seidl questioned the concept of routine: what exactly are routines and what question does the routine concept help to answer? He also pointed out that the routine dynamics and the dynamic routines views adopt different perspective and ontological assumptions that make their integration problematic.

Under Pressure: Community Amplification of Protest and Corporate Response

Michael Lounsbury (U. of Alberta) - Provocateur: Julie Battilana (HBS)

Michael Lounsbury discussed the traditional institutional approach of structuration dynamics by introducing a community-based perspective of anti-toxics protests. Developing the under-theorized concept of institutional pressure, Lee and Lounsbury investigate how local activism affects community factors  (social capital, social movement organizations’ resources), intensifying or weakening pressures on organizations. In doing so, they explore how protest and civic engagement affect the building of healthy communities. Using data on toxic releases of 118 facilities from 35 communities in Texas and Louisiana (1991-2003), they study the moderating effects of community resources (social capital vs. material/ organizational resources) on activism aimed at altering corporate polluting behavior. Results reveal that community-level social capital has robust direct effects on polluters’ behavior, suggesting that community level norms have a crucial effect on polluting organizations even in the absence of activism. They find that activism and organizational infrastructures are important for communities with medium social capital, but appear ineffective in case of either low social capital or high social capital.

As provocateur, Julie Battilana chiefly emphasized the diversity and heterogeneity of protests, which may also determine their direct effect on pollution. The audience raised several stimulating questions, mostly related to the boundaries of communities, potential spillover effects across communities (at national and transnational levels), and the sources of social capital.

Laws of Attraction: Regulatory Arbitrage in the Face of Activism in Right to Work States

Hayagreeva Rao (Stanford U.) - Provocateur: Erhard Friedberg (Sciences Po)

Social movement protesters and firms can be regarded as actors that strategically interact. In their study of Wal-Mart store openings (1997-2008), Rao, Yue and Ingram find strong evidence that Wal-Mart takes into account protesters’ regulatory opportunities when selecting new store locations. Focusing on regulatory differences across State borders in the United States, they observe that Wal-Mart, a non-unionized firm, is more likely to issue proposals to open new stores, and then to actually open new stores, within the borders of states with Right-to-Work (anti-union) laws when compared to similar areas where such regulations do not apply. In the triad formed by the firm, the protesters, and the local government, jurisdictional competition shifts power to firms, which appear to be more responsive than activists to regulatory arbitrage.

The triadic model of domain consensus helps shedding light on the interplay between social movements and target firms. However, as Erhard Friedberg remarked, activist groups might not be homogenous. They actually include a large variety of individuals and organizations with various backgrounds and goals that a more qualitative design may contribute to understand better. Additionally, the research setting reveals a puzzle: knowing that legislative heterogeneity empowers firms at the expense of society, why state regulations do not converge?

The Consequences of Boundary Spanning: Repression and Disbanding of US Women’s protest Organizations

Sarah Soule (Stanford U.) - Provocateur: Frank den Hond (VU U., Amsterdam)

Past research has shown that actors spanning social categories (e.g., stock brokers’ classifications, movies genres) can be subject to various penalties. Not only do they tend to spread themselves and cannot thus perform optimally, but they also loose some of the attention of their primary audiences that have trouble understanding what they actually do. Would such finding hold when applied at protest organizations? That is the question raised by Fassiotto and Soule when investigating women protests in the United States (1960-1995). They find that events that incorporate several claims or unite different protest groups tend to lead to more women arrests by police forces. In addition, protest organizations involved in such events have a lower likelihood of protesting in the future.  The results suggest that, like for-profit actors, social movements actors and organizations may also be penalized for category spanning at both the event level (claims) and the organizational level (protest groups). As a result, movement coalitions may not always work.

The provocateur Frank den Hond reminded the audience that hybrid identities may fail, but sometimes also work (e.g., the SUV segment in the automobile market). He pointed out that the boundaries of the unit of analysis (a protest organization) needed to be carefully defined to avoid artifacts that may bias the observed results. Several questions were also raised in the audience. Aren’t there occasions where police arrests are beneficial to movements, as they attract the attention of the media? And isn’t increased repression a result of the political nature of protests involving more than one claim or one group or, alternatively, a consequence of the inherent lower level of group control in such protests?

When Movements Do Not Innovate

Francesca Polletta (U. of California, Irvine) - Provocateur: Quy Huy (INSEAD)

Francesca Polletta held the final session, introducing an exciting topic: when movements do not innovate. She discussed the prevailing view of social movement theory, traditionally useful to understand institutional change, which sheds light on the cultural obstacles preventing movements from innovating. Studying participatory democracy in six movement organizations and one multi-organizational coalition, she suggested that even when decision-making rules have proven counterproductive, founders didn’t modify them because this change would have jeopardized the very meaning of the relationships. As a result, social movements fail to innovate because activists are more invested in maintaining the integrity of relationships (e.g., friendship) than in preserving other schemas (e.g., participatory democracy as a new form of organization).

Concluding the day, Quy Huy stressed the narrative and emotional dimensions of movements, and the fruitful avenues for future research lying in their incorporation into social movement theory: do emotional investments always lead to dysfunctional inertia or can they be constructive under some circumstances? What criteria should we use to evaluate what is dysfunctional or constructive? Is it possible to modify emotional investments? The audience completed these suggestions arguing that analyzing successful cases of participatory democracy would be a great contribution to a failure-biased literature.

Report by Julien Jourdan & Lionel Paollella, HEC Paris

[1] Seminars co-organized by Rouen Business School (Damon Golsorkhi and Bernard Leca), Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Sciences Po (Christine Musselin) and HEC Paris (Rodolphe Durand).

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Jun 17

June 25: practical informations

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Coming to HEC

Two buses will leave at 7:40 from the following metro stations in the South of Paris (see maps of the area and the Paris metro):

  • Metro station “Porte de Versailles” (metro line 12): the bus will be waiting in front of Gate L of the exhibition center,
  • Metro station “Place Balard” (metro line 8 )

The buses belong to “SAVAC” company and will have a “SNO-HEC” sign on the front.

If you intend to take one of the buses, please email Veronique (hoffsteter@hec.fr) as soon as possible to let her know whether you will be leaving from “Balard” or “Porte de Versailles”.

Conference

Coffee and pastries will be served before the sessions start (program).

The conference will take place in Amphi TEZENAS (maps of the campus and the main building).

If weather permits, lunch will be served outside to facilitate exchanges among participants.

Going back to Paris

The buses will leave the campus at 6.45 pm. One bus will go directly to our Social Event, “le Musée du Vin“, where we will have a great dinner and nice wine tasting (see access map).

The other bus will leave you at Metro stations “Balard” and “Porte de Versailles”.

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Jun 17

2010 Medici Summer School: Rare Events

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Overview: Managing Rare Events and Learning from the Unexpected

The 2010 Medici Summer School was held in La Pietra International Conference and Events Center, Florence, Italy, between June 7th and 11th. It was co-sponsored by Alma Graduate School of Management (University of Bologna), HEC Paris School of Management and Stern School of Business (New York University) and is the second edition of the Medici Summer School in Management Studies for doctoral students and young researchers. The Summer School is designed to promote doctoral education and research in management studies and contribute to the development of enlightened practice in the management of business organizations.

The one-week program allows for ample interaction between students and faculty as it combines lectures, research seminars and student presentations, as well as social events.

25 PhD students from various universities including Oxford, Cambridge, NYU, McGill, LBS, Bologna, and HEC, among others, attended the school. This year’s focus was on the role that “unexpected events” play in organizational functioning. The discussions revolved around two key questions:  How do unexpected events affect, and get shaped by, organizations? How can managers learn from and manage unexpected events?

Starting with a discussion on the notion of rare events and their meaning for research on strategy and organizations, the summer school continued with the application of econometric models to rare events and examined how these models fare in the presence of rare events.  The focus then shifted to the cognitive aspects of rare events, and how managerial interpretation mattered. Finally, the current state of research on rare events and possible avenues for future research on the subject was explored.

1st day

On the first day, Joe Lampel (City University) explored how rare events can be an impetus to pursue fundamental change for organizations. He argued that the issue is not so much what organizations learn “from” rare events but what they learn “through” rare events. Starting from two definitions of unusual events (either as low-probability estimates or as enacted salience), he investigated three potential consequences of unexpected events for organizations: auditing existent response repertories, strengthening organizing routines, and transforming organizational identity. As an example of learning processes triggered by rare events, he presented his empirical study about the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum’s roof collapse, which offered an opportunity for learning and transforming the organization’s identity.

2nd day

On the second day, William Greene (NYU) gave his first lecture, in which he talked about the distinction between rare and unusual events, modeling, probabilities, correlation and regression. He emphasized that assigning probabilities to events requires a construct of a meaningful framework within which the experiment can be repeated, and that assigning infinitesimal probabilities to events in retrospect is not a productive exercise. A rare event, as a black swan, is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: it is unpredictable, carries a massive impact; and after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.

He continued his lecture with econometric modeling when there are unusual events -rather than rare events- and how to use outside information in a Bayesian update. Invalid model assumptions such as Gaussian Copula function of David Li, which was used to price hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of CDOs filled with mortgages, is also discussed.

3rd day

William Greene held the morning session and gave his second lecture. The topics covered included linear and robust quantile regression, robust quantile models for counts and binary choice when the event is unusual. Greene concluded by emphasizing that rare events are outside the realm of modeling paradigm and hence econometric models can only accommodate unusual events. Still, models may be merely inadequate, as outliers are “unusual” in the context of the model and may be a consequence of the specification.

Raghu Garud (Penn State University) held the afternoon session of the third day. He discussed the prevailing view of rare events as very low-probability estimates. Preferring the “unusual event” expression to that of “rare event”, he shed light on narrative development processes that help organizations learn from unusual experiences. Through narratives, actors within organizations create situated understandings and negotiate consensual meanings of these unusual events. Meanings are more constructed upon experiences and memories of actors than given by events. That helps explain differentiated responses amongst organizations to unexpected events.

4th day

On the fourth day, Zur Shapira (NYU) discussed whether it is possible to learn under extreme and recurring conditions. He presented his paper “Organizational Learning under Extreme Turbulent & Recurring Conditions: Effect of costs of anticipated consequences on hurricane evacuation decisions”, which focuses on the behavior of local officials in making evacuation decision. He discussed how judgmental issues involved in decision making increased the number of evacuation “errors” and he pointed to the gap between the intentions to learn and the harsh reality that makes such learning a very difficult task.

5th day

On the last day, Jerker Denrell (Oxford University) raised a surprising question: Are the best performers the most impressive? He suggested that when trying to explain extreme performances of firms, people give more credit to luck than to skills. A fat-tailed error term generates non-monotonic association between outcomes and expectations. He also discussed the implications of under-sampling of failure, which makes it very hard to identify factors that lead firms from “incompetent” to “fine”.

Throughout the week, students were able to present their papers and get feedback from both faculty and peers. Students also had the opportunity to carry informal discussions with faculty during lunch breaks and during a pizza party at a very nice restaurant overlooking Florence from the famous Fiesole heights.

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